MediaMath Developer Blog Authors

Travis Barnes is the Technology Communications Manager at MediaMath, where he helps the engineering teams communicate the massive challenges that they tackle to the rest of the world. When not in the office, he is exploring Brooklyn’s music scene or digging through the crates of his local record store.

TRAVIS BARNES

Travis Barnes is the Technology Communications Manager at MediaMath, where he helps the engineering teams communicate the massive challenges that they tackle to the rest of the world. When not in the office, he is exploring Brooklyn’s music scene or digging through the crates of his local record store.

At the Spark Summit in Brussels, MediaMath’s SVP of Data Science, Prasad Chalasani, gave an invited keynote talk, Extreme Scale Ad-Tech at MediaMath with Spark and Databricks. MediaMath’s demand-side platform responds to over 200 billion ad-opportunities daily, and leverages massive amounts of data to power smarter digital marketing. We use Spark heavily both in production and R&D to develop innovative, proprietary, and scalable solutions to multiple large-scale data problems, such as: Training Machine-learning models for predicting conversion probability given an ad-impression Measuring causal effectiveness of advertising using randomized tests Estimating audience reach for specified targeting criteria. Finding deviceIDs belonging to the same user based on […]

Owein Reese, who manages a group of engineers in MediaMath’s Creatives Management Tribe, took an unusual route to a career in software development. Owein’s mother was a programmer at IBM back in the days of punch-card programming (well… the 80’s) but punch cards failed to interest him in programming as a child. It wasn’t until he got to college that he began to write code to solve mathematical problems and still later on in his career that software became the focus. Owein entered the University of Rochester with degrees in optical engineering and math at the peak of the dotcom […]

Last week, MediaMath employees around the world tuned in for our bi-annual hackathon, and hosted more than a dozen teams working for 24 hours to build projects that wouldn’t otherwise make out sprint schedule. Joe Zawadzki, our CEO, and Byron Ellis, the CTO of Spongecell and our guest judge, shared their thoughts immediately after watching presentations from the participants.

Last week, MediaMath’s hosted its global hackathon and what we hope will be the new template for internal technology events. MediaMath has hosted a number of hackathons in the past, and each one has seen more than its share of ambitious ideas and ingenuous solutions to everyday problems. This iteration was unique for a number of reasons—the 24-hour time-frame and global participation—but it demonstrated once again the energy and ingenuity of our team here at MediaMath. A snapshot of the hackathon, by the numbers… ~73 participants 14 teams/projects 24 hours to hack 8 locations: NYC, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Cambridge, Oregon, […]

Last month at the New York Scala Meetup, Owein Reese introduced the Autolifts library in Scala. Autolifts takes advantage of Scala’s advanced type system to yield a set of abstractions for working with complex objects. In this talk, Owein introduces the concept of lifting and why you might want to incorporate this pattern in your code. The library takes that concept, mixes it with dependent types and implicit extensions to automatically lift in a type safe manner. These extensions simplify code, reducing boilerplate while making code more easily understood and maintained. Thanks to Hakka Labs for recording and producing the video of this talk.

There’s a reason Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent has become the go-to conference for developers in the cloud computing industry– the product launches and releases announced set the tone for the way companies will grow and change over the coming year. The conference has seen enormous growth over it’s four-year history and, this year, more than 18,000 developers descended on Las Vegas to witness 21 product and feature launches and over 275 sessions and workshops. Here is what members of the MediaMath team had to say about what they found the most exciting at re:Invent: Event-driven Architecture “Enterprises with strong […]